Chapter Six

 

 

 

As she pulled into the deserted underground garage, the racing of Kelly’s heart had nothing to do with the fact that hers was the only car there other than a dark blue Audi R8. It had everything to do with the man inside the car. Alex Valens sat slumped in the seat, a pair of Bose headphones nestled down in his ruffled hair and over his ears. His eyes were closed. The rocking of his body and the nodding of his head informed her that whatever he was listening to, he was enjoying the experience. She got out of the car and, for a moment, she stood watching him. Observing the man at his ease, watching him enjoy himself, was like seeing a different person, someone she’d only glimpsed through the haze of tension and nerves he’d wrapped himself in last week. He was a beautiful man, clearly a strong man, and she was glad he’d called her back. She hoped this time he would at least talk to her.

As though he sensed her presence, he opened his eyes, eyes fringed in thick, dark lashes, and offered her a smile that made her insides feel like warm honey. She smiled back, then he glanced around for his minder, but there was no sign of anyone but the two of them. He slid the headphones off and tucked them in the glove box, then he opened the door and unfolded himself, keeping enough personal space not to feel threatened, but not so much that she couldn’t see just how tall he was. She was five-ten, and she looked up to him even in her heels.

“Your hair, it’s red. Forgive me,” he said. “Hotel rooms are never well lit, and last week, well, last week, I preferred it that way. It’s just that, in the subdued lighting, I thought you were a blonde.”

She absently reached up to stroke her hair and felt a shiver of pleasure as his eyes followed the motion. “Well, it’s not proper red, just sort of a weird strawberry blondish.” Fuck if she wasn’t blushing, and this man was her client, not her date, she reprimanded herself.

“I’m sorry for my bad behavior last week. I was…” He shrugged helplessly as though words had failed him.

“It’s all right.” She fell into step next to him as he motioned her toward the private elevator. “Often my clients aren’t sure how to behave when we first meet. When they see I don’t pose a threat, that I really am there to help, they calm down. You’re not the first to leave before his hour was up. But you’re also not the first to call back for another appointment.”

As they entered the elevator, he took one last look at the parking garage. “No bodyguard?”

“Nope. You?”

“I gave him the night off. I don’t need him to run interference for me here. I own the place.” Then he quickly added, “I hope that’s all right.”

“I trust you,” she said. “And if you pull anything funny, well, I know martial arts, and I fight dirty.”

“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.”

The elevator glided to a stop and the doors slid aside silently. Kelly found herself in an open-plan apartment with sleek, unobtrusive furniture in neutral tones, all designed to show off the masterpiece of the flat, which was the city and the river just beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows. For a moment, they both admired the view of the sun setting over the river, painting the sky tangerine and peach. “Wow,” she said. “Much nicer than the hotel.”

He nodded her over to a rounded sofa that curved intimately in an alcove that was also windowed floor to ceiling. Once the niceties were sorted and he’d brought them both a glass of sparkling water, she noticed that he was pushing his limits, sitting as close to her as he dared then backing off just slightly when his pulse began to pound in his temples and his forehead sheened with a patina of perspiration. She started to scoot away, but he raised a hand. “No. Stay where you are. I’m fine. This is how I want it.”

“All right.” She gave him a moment to gather himself, then she smiled and nodded to her bag. “I brought canned pears, though I would imagine you might want to save those for another day.”

“When you touch yourself,” he blurted, taking them both by surprise. “What does it feel like? I want to know how it would be to…” He looked down at his hand, which was a tight fist in his lap, and he made a conscious effort to open it, turn it palm up and ease it down next to his thigh until it rested cupped on the sofa between them.

“There’s a lot of me to touch, Mr. Valens—”

“Alex.” His voice was a forced whisper. “The question I just asked you is a little too personal for you to call me Mr. Valens. Besides, it’s—”

“Not your real name, yes, I suspected as much, Alex. Now, as I was saying, there’s a lot of me to touch. You watched me touch my hair in the parking garage. It feels soft, sort of cool right now.” She smiled as she stroked her hair, and once again his full attention was on the movement of her hand. “I’ve always thought hair was the most sensual part of a person. The hair on our head, on our faces, on our bodies, it’s one of those constant reminders of our connections to our animal cousins. We stroke it for the same reason we stroke a cat’s fur. It feels good. I wear mine up most of the time because I have a habit of playing with it.” She twisted a strand around her fingers and heard him catch a breath. “It can be distracting.”

“It is,” he gasped. “Very distracting.”

She stopped, pushed her hair back over her shoulder and folded her hands in her lap. “What do you want, Alex? Tell me what you want.”

“Your neck,” he said. “When you pushed your hair back, there was a trail of goosebumps along your neck, down your throat and over your collar bone. How did that feel?”

She laughed a little breathless grunt. “My nape and my throat, and this area just above my collar bones”—she ran her hand along the path as she described it, feeling another rise of goose bumps—“it’s one of my erogenous zones. If someone touches me anywhere there, if I touch myself there, I feel it in a lot of other places.”

His gaze dropped to her nipples, then he quickly glanced away.

“It’s all right if you look, Alex. Touching my nape and my collar bones makes my nipples hard.”

With permission granted, he leaned forward until she could almost feel his breath, studying the path she had described to him and the response of her nipples. Responses further down, he couldn’t see, and anyway, she wasn’t sure if those were from her touch or from his curious gaze.

“What about you, Alex? What do you feel like?’

He looked down at his open palm. “My hands…” He rubbed the left over the palm of the right in slow circles. “They’re calloused from the work I do. V says I should take better care of them. V’s my housekeeper,” he clarified. “But I like them rough. They remind me of the things I make smooth and there’s a contrast, this amazing contrast, when I touch smooth stone or”—he placed a palm against the flat of his belly—“or the more tender parts of my body—my stomach, my inner thighs.” He placed both palms in his lap then curled them into relaxed fists and looked up at her. “My cock.” If he blushed, the fading light hid it from her, but the rise and fall of his throat as he swallowed could have easily been the shifting of tectonic plates in the unmoving stillness.

“I have callouses,” she said, fisting her own hands to mirror his. “From martial arts training. I like the way they feel. They make me feel strong.”

“And when you touch your breasts with them?” His voice was little more than a whisper, and this time even the fading light couldn’t hide his blush.

“When I touch my breasts with my calloused hands, when I touch myself”—she nodded down to her lap—“that’s when I feel strongest, like there are parts of me that can make love to me and protect me and keep me from flying apart into a million little fragments when sometimes I feel like that’s a real possibility.”

He stood so quickly that she thought perhaps she’d upset him again and that he was going to ask her to leave. “Come with me,” he said. “To the kitchen. I want to see you. I can’t see you here. That was better last week. It’s not better now. I want to see how you touch your hair, how you touch your neck, the way you look when you talk to me.”

The kitchen was huge and white. All the surfaces that weren’t white marble were stainless.

“Sit there. No, not on the stools, on the countertop.” He hurried around the room, turning on more lights from more switches than she had in her whole house. “Get comfortable. Take off your shoes.”

She might have been a bit more nervous had she not been drawn into the man’s enthusiasm, in such high contrast to the morose brooder she’d been with at the hotel. Once he was certain every light in the kitchen was on and the huge marble worktop was bathed in light, he pulled up one of the stools and sat with his elbows resting on the surface. “Go on, don’t dangle your feet.” He made a shooing motion with his hands until she pulled her feet and legs onto the cool surface and sat cross-legged, smack dab in the middle of the work space. “That’s better. I want to see you. I want to see all of you.” He must have caught the look of panic on her face. He backpedaled quickly. “What I mean is that I want to see your face. I… Since I don’t have the benefit of physical contact, I’ve grown more sensitive to people’s faces and how they respond to touch. If that makes any sense.”

It did.

“What do you want from me, Alex?” It felt strange using her professional voice when she sat cross-legged and barefoot in the middle of the man’s kitchen island, but she had to bring things back on track before she forgot entirely why she was here.

He was quiet so long that she thought she’d lost him again, then he took a deep breath and sat up straight on the stool. “I didn’t really know what I wanted when I was with you last week, and that was what frustrated me so. I knew I wanted something from you. I just didn’t know what it was.”

“And now?”

“I want to know what it would feel like…if I touched you. If I touched any woman,” he added quickly before there was another chance for panic.

This time it wasn’t panic that overwhelmed her, but the sudden realization that Alex Valens had never touched a woman.

He was right about his ability to read faces. He caught her thoughts almost as though he’d read her mind. “Before you ask me, the answer is yes. I have seen a psychiatrist, numerous psychiatrists, in fact, some of the best in the world. And I’ve been on multiple types of meds until I got sick of the whole…“ He caught his breath and looked around the kitchen, as though he hoped to find the right words on the shelf with the spices. “I’m a creative person, as you said, and my gift depends on me being able to think outside the box, me being able to see things differently, even if I can’t…touch anyone or let anyone touch me. Drugs hampered that, and I felt like I couldn’t even touch myself when I was taking the meds. And I still couldn’t stand to be touched.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, softly.

“Look, I don’t expect you to deal with what a fucked-up mess I am. I realized that what I really want to know is what it feels like, what you feel like, what any woman feels like when she’s with a man, or even when she touches herself, and I have no one I would feel comfortable asking without wondering the whole time if they thought that by my asking that I had given them permission to try and fix me. Does that make any sense?”

She had little time to do more than nod before he continued.

“Oh, I’ve watched enough porn that I get it feels really good. I’ve read enough erotica to get some picture of how it’s supposed to be, but my take on it is always one-sided.” He raised his hand and wiggled his fingers as though to demonstrate. “I can’t know anything but my own touch. Certainly, I can’t feel anything else, so I want you to tell me. I want you to answer my questions. I want you to tell me what I would feel if I touched you, what you would feel if I touched you. As for what I would feel if you touched me, well”—he shrugged and offered her a smile that seemed slightly forced—“for that, I’ll just have to use my imagination.”

She took a deep breath, as though she were about to dive under water. “Okay, well, I’ll start with my lips because lovers often start there. I would have made sure they were moist for you before you kissed them, but not so wet as to be off-putting, and you would have done the same. And your first kisses would be tentative, if you’re really good, almost like a feather lighting against my mouth softly and repeatedly until I’m breathless for the want of more. Then I would part my lips to give you more surface area so that we could feel each other better.” She chuckled softly as she realized they’d both raised their fingers to their mouths. “Then we would both press harder and rub harder. The more surface area we touched the more we’d want and, I think lips swell, not just from the pressure, but in an effort to create that surface area, and when they can swell no more, when I feel like I want to completely take my lover into my mouth, then I would open to him, and there would be a whole new surface area, wet and slick and warm, there would be a whole new motion when our tongues discover each other. I think a kiss reflects what happens in penetrative sex. It’s sort of an intimation, if you will.” Her gaze locked on him, and, for the first time, she noticed just how blue his eyes were. “A promise of things to come.”

“Yes,” he whispered. “I’ve thought of that in my art. I’ve thought of the interchange we make with mouths and cocks and vaginas.” He struggled with the last word.

“It’s okay to call it a pussy or a cunt or whatever works for you,” she said.

He laughed softly. “How the hell would I know?”

“Well.” She stretched out on the countertop and rolled onto her side, resting her head on her hand. “You just have to try them out and see how they fit your mouth.”

This time they both laughed. “If they fit my mouth, I wouldn’t have to worry about what words I used, would I?”

“Good point,” she said.

“Not quite, but getting there fast, thank you.”

Again, they both laughed, a strangely relaxed laugh under the bizarre circumstances.

“The thing is,” she said, rolling onto her back and staring up at the long rack of copper bottom pans above her head, “words are often as important in sex, and as erotic, as touch. I write in my other life, and I find that while some of my characters get turned on by waxing poetic between the sheets, others get hot by talking dirty.”

“How does your cunt feel when some fucker talks dirty to you?” he asked, though not without a hearty blush.

“That would depend on the fucker and the circumstances and how badly I wanted to ride his cock.”

“And if it was a fucker whose cock you really wanted to ride, a fucker who was hard and heavy for you? What words would he use, and what response would he elicit?”

“It wouldn’t hurt for him to observe aloud what he sees about my body’s state of arousal, and how he admires it.”

“You mean like how lovely your breasts are when your nipples are so taut that even your areolae are visible through that shirt, which I imagine feels like a caress every time you inhale. You mean like the way your lips are parted and moist. You’ve not completely shut your mouth for the past five minutes, the way you rock your hips, almost but not quite secretly, and grind your bottom against the countertop. Is that what you mean?”

“Jesus! We shouldn’t be doing this.” She sat bolt upright on the surface then froze as though someone had hit the pause button. “Alex?”

The man perched on the edge of the counter, just far enough away that she couldn’t easily touch him. He had kicked his shoes off and his own nipples peaked to bullet points through his white polo shirt. That would have been enough to hold her attention indefinitely had it not been for the heel of his hand stroking the very obvious, very anxious erection through his jeans.

It was all right. It was fine, she told herself. She’d had more than a few occasions where her job involved watching and coaching someone while they masturbated. This was just her job. That’s all.

“It’s more obvious with me what I feel,” he said, raking her body with a hooded gaze. “And your nipples, well, you could just be cold. Please tell me what you feel when you see me like this, when we talk like this.”

She moved to the edge of the counter giving him space, then motioned him onto it, then she opened her legs. “If I weren’t wearing trousers, if you could see my panties, you’d know that I’m wet.” She nodded to his erection. “You’d know that the thought of what you’re doing, the sight of how your body is responding to mine, is making me wetter.” She cupped her breasts in turn, through the white blouse. “Every part of me feels heavy, Alex. My breasts feel like my bra can no longer contain them. My nipples ache. And my lips…” She touched her mouth, then, holding his gaze, moved her hand down to rest on the crotch of her trousers. “My lips are swollen, so swollen and slippery and ready to be penetrated.” She nodded first to his mouth then to his erection. “Do I want the fucker to give it to me hard and deep in my cunt? What do you think?”

“Oh, God,” he managed. Then he stopped talking altogether. His breath came in tight little grunts and gasps as he moved against his hand, holding her in his gaze as surely as if he held her in his embrace, and it was in that instant, the instant she slid her hand down the front of her trousers and into her panties, an action he mirrored, that she knew neither of them would make it out of here intact. She wanted to run, but she didn’t. She wanted to take off her clothes and feel his gaze all over her body, but she didn’t. She wanted to demand that he strip for her, that he come just for her eyes, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. She could only cup and grope her breasts until they hurt. She could only stroke herself while she watched him do the same.

The space around them crackled with their energy, and their desperate efforts to breathe were the only sounds beyond the stroke of skin against fabric. In a hungry attempt at relief, they both rocked and bucked, mirror images of each other with one hand down the front of their trousers while the other groped and cupped and tweaked and pinched whatever part of their anatomy it came in contact with. Then breathing stopped, time stopped. Everything around them disappeared until they saw nothing but each other, locked in each other’s gazes, more physical than any embrace Kelly had ever felt, and it was enough. Heaven help them, it was enough. He came first by a split second, roaring like a wounded lion, arching back until she feared he’d either break his neck or fall off the counter. But the sight of him so vulnerable in his passion, the fact that even in his release, he kept his eyes on her was all she could handle, and she convulsed against her own hand, convulsed as though she would break apart, never taking her eyes off him, never breaking that connection.

 

* * * *

 

When she woke, long toward morning, the kitchen lights still burned brightly, the room now smelled of sex, the sex that hadn’t happened, and yet was way more than any sex she’d ever had, the sex that was sadly as close as Alex Valens, or whatever his real name was, was likely to ever get. And she had taken him there. The thought pleased her only until the realization hit her that she had taken their relationship far beyond the professional level. To her surprise, he was stretched out on the wide marble island next to her, but even in sleep, careful not to touch her—and he was deeply asleep. She allowed herself the brief luxury of studying him at his ease. He looked so young. There was no rapid eye movement, so she knew he wasn’t dreaming, but when dreams did come, she hoped they’d be good ones. Quietly, she slid off the table and found her shoes and her bag. For another long moment, she stood watching him sleep, feeling gutted, even in the afterglow of the place where they’d taken each other. What she had done was a betrayal of trust and a betrayal of her own professionalism. It was a betrayal of him. They could not, under any circumstances, do this again. She turned and made her way to the elevator. The only way she knew to guarantee she wouldn’t do the same with Alex Valens and more was not to see him again.